For teens coming of age in “Generation Like,” the great anonymob is everything. Likes, clicks, views, shares, upvotes, buzz. Their lives play out in pings and swipes and blips, a worldwide band of Narcissuses, stooping and reflected in their carefully curated personal audiences on scratch-proof pocket screens.
And the movie folks want to seize all this, to tap into the main vein, to suck out the thick, viscous truth, and sell it back to us. Imagine the pitch meetings: Silver-chest-maned studio brass sipping Smart Water and dragging in “new media experts” to rub some magic lamps and unlock the secrets of this bizarre age … a world where online lynch gangs, faceless and merciless, pounce upon guilty tweets and ostracize, banish, punish with a zealot’s mad glee … a world where the inverse relation between accountability and acceptability is laid stark and bare every single day … a world of wild-eyed entitlement monsters broadcasting their daily ephemera as their corporate landlords hoover it all up for the Great Ad Targeting Machine that comes as close to a printer for money as you’re likely to find these days. “There’s a story there,” the silver foxes agree. “A story there.”
And there is, you know. There are.
Okay, that’s over with. Now that I’ve given myself a Pooplitzer in New Media Skepticism, let’s talk about the movie.
Nerve is indeed an at times implausible attempt to bottle the frenetic cloud-borne flavor of our age, and bully for the silver foxes for trying, you know. Emma Roberts plays Venus, a shy high schooler who’s enticed to play Nerve–a sort of Vine-meets-reddit-meets-Pokemon Go distributed game but with dares and stunts and cash money payout. 
Users elect either to “play” or to “watch”–the former perform dares for money, while the latter pay to view and flock to whomever seems most worth watching. The platform does nicely capture the insta-famous mania we all now know, and asks how far we’d go when whipped to a frenzy by thousands of anonymous watchers. Venus meets Dave Franco, a fellow player, and together they do dares until — and I feel Syd Field‘s ghost taking the pen — it all gets out of hand!
And that’s when things get dumb. See, the thing about distributed Internet mobbing is that the mob is fickle, and typically has an awfully short attention span. These are the same people who abandon online shopping carts to watch a cat playing table tennis, or share a picture of supermarket ramen through a Polaroid filter. So while I’m very willing to buy that watchers would dare a cute player to flash a crowd, say, it’s asking a lot to accept that the mob somehow cooks up on the fly a detailed series of events with truly Batkid-level advance planning. The silver foxes just cannot help themselves: They MUST have a villain, and that villain must do grand and bad things, even when that villain is — inexplicably — the faceless masses hiding behind their phones. So there’s rot at the core of the story.
But setting that aside, this is a surprisingly watchable and enjoyable film. Story-wise, it’s Hackers and The Net meet Unfriended and Crank. Visually, it’s John Wick meets Drive and The Bling Ring. It’s energetic and fast, bouncing along from dare to dare; it’s visually striking, with a dark and neon-lit New York and shiny dresses and LED-bathed Triumphs; it also has a fantastic and chill synth-heavy soundtrack that builds nicely. Juliette Lewis hams it up way too hard as Venus’s Luddite mother, but otherwise the performances are not at all bad. The leads are watchable, Franco got surprisingly diesel for this role, and there’s plenty here to keep the popcorn a-munching and the ICEEs a-flow.
As long as you’re fine with the story going to stupid places — places where the only way out is a big button labeled DEUS EX — then see this film. I actually had a really good time.
Haus Verdict: Neon and night, visually striking, great music, high energy, decent leads. A tale of the times that’s not done right, but is worth the ride nonetheless.
Nerve opened July 27.
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